The liberal democratic states have tended to view the recent events in Taiwan as another episode of something like the series, Game of Thrones. The liberal democracies, like the noble houses playing the great game in fantasy historical political dramas, think in terms of chess. That is a natural--a semiotic incarnation--of the fundamental approaches to the rationalization of order, the expectations of social organization, and the elaboration of the highest objectives of political organs--
the object is to capture the king, and thus the kingdom. These political organs are hierarchical, but consist of semi autonomous actors, each a prisoner of the characteristics that define themselves and their roles in both the social order and in the objectives of collective organization. The bishop, the castle, the horse. . . . the pawn. The chessboard itself serves as the boundaries of the reality within which the internal games among collectives takes place. Beyond the board there is nothing--or at least nothing worth signification. Power relations in chess are contained within the board (like they are contained within the institutions of state) but are understood as the aggregation of aligned demi-powers with their own attributes. That is, power relations are endogenous and the players are understood to be the forces of nature.
Taiwan is a piece on the liberal democratic chessboard, but the Chinese vanguard sees Taiwan as a space, a territory, on a vastly different board, the rules of which, it players and objectives, are in some ways strikingly different (even in subtle ways) from the chess board in which the liberal democracies place Taiwan. The game, its rules, structures, and boundaries are as confining as those of chess. But this is not chess. It is Go. Like chess it is played on a square board. But the pieces (stones) are undifferentiated. They are all pawns--the leader sits outside the board directing the pawns, rather than in the game itself. The King in Go--the vanguard or leading force, sits outside the board (the field of play). In chess, the leading forces act collaboratively and oppositionally within the board. And the object is different-
-the object is territory. One wins when one surrounds more territory than an opponent. Power relations in Go lie outside the game. There is a sharp division between the mass forces on the board and the leading forces of the guiding vanguard. Like chess, Go players are constrained by the inherent nature of the pieces--but that nature is both different and directed toward different ends. In Go power relations are exogenous and the players are the vanguard and holders of the mandate of heaven (where heaven is understood to be the incarnation of the rules themselves) who move the masses over territories they seek to control.
This difference, perhaps, speaks to much of the inability of either Chinese or American elites to understand each other, much less to find a space of common ground beyond the ambiguity of effects (interpreted--signified-- in substantially different ways). That has been the story of the so-called "One China" policy. And it helps explain the risk of engagement as either side seeks to shift the effects on which the ability of ambiguity rests. Both sides have been doing a bit of shifting effects lately. Both sides see an end game in sight--the Chinese to acquire territory (the victory in Go); and the Americans to move to constrain the king and dominate the board (the victory in chess). Both sides have advanced arguments to support their actions and justify their objectives. Neither side is listening very intently to the other. While the Chinese seek territorial union (and from it the consequences of territorial control), the Americans seek extra sovereign autonomy--not control of the territory but the autonomy of the Taiwanese under the umbrella of a rules based international order (as they call it).
Applying the semiotics of the games that define a civilization (more on that term below), one can see how civilization defines the premises through which perception (and thus the construction) of challenge and interactions are China looks at Taiwan and sees territory with people on it; the United States looks at Taiwan and sees people who create a society on a territory. These differences, and their relationship to civilization, and to civilization's relationship to Taiwan are the central object of an important essay that was circulated recently in China. In "
The rise of great powers and the revival of civilization——The Taiwan issue under the "protracted war of
civilization", Peking University's Jiang Shigong correctly argues that the issue of Taiwan is not merely a political issue, but more importantly it marks an important point in a longer term ideological event.
For Jiang, then, Taiwan is the current battlefield of modernity, and of China's engagement and then liberation from it. Through this lens, it become quite clear that to liberate Taiwan is effectively to liberate Chinese civilization with its engagement with Anglo-European modernity, and the equally ancient civilization that they represent. Jiang argues, and again correctly, that Taiwan is not yet another example of the playing out of pathetic versions of realpolitik by inferior practitioners with the breadth of knowledge of a glowworm at noon. Instead it represents an important point in the consequences of the peculiar form of Chinese confrontation with European modernity in the late Qing (prior engagements appear to have been more propitious). For Jiang, 这不是单纯军事战争，而是近代以来面对西方文明侵入，中国人在政治、经济和文化各领域展开的生死存亡之战 ["This is not a purely military war, but a life-and-death battle for the Chinese people in the political, economic and cultural fields in the face of the invasion of Western civilization since modern times." Editor's Introduction].
The essay on Taiwan, then, starts at its center--the fundamentally unfinished business of Chinese confrontation with the delights and perils of received modernity. It then incarnates that unfinished business within the geographies of the territorial humiliations of the decaying Qing, and of the need to regain what was lost. Ideology and civilization, in other words as territory. It then situates that territory (in this case Taiwan) among the variations in conceptions of the international order and within Chinese politics. All of this is undertaken by way of introduction to the larger themes playing out within the small vessel which is Taiwan--the protracted war of civilizations as Jiang calls it. That takes the analysis outward ("National Strategy in the Stage of Strategic Stalemate") and inward ("The Challenge of Taiwan issue to Mainland Academics") and back again to modernity ("Reconstruction of History and Modernity") and the politics of civilization. This time the Chinese leadership will apply in a more innovative fashion the lessons of Hong Kong 2019 ("Academics and Politics").
Is Jiang playing on a "Go" board, on a "chess" board, or is the seeking to play on an altogether different board? Perhaps, it is more accurate to say that what Jiang sounds the alarm about is the dangers of turning Go "stones" to individualized chess pieces. That may be the thinking that drives the current intensity of response to the current Taiwan situation brought into the open with the visit of Mrs. Pelosi to Taiwan but long simmering. While liberal democratic elites and their press organ popularizers continue to thnk in terms of chess, and through the methodological lens of interest oriented politics, their Chinese opponents may be thinking along quite different, and for them, quite fndametally decisive lines. That does not change objectives, bit it may suggest a means of improving communication and adjusting strategy to align objectives and tactics against a better understood target. That, at any rate, might be useful to consider on the liberal democratic side. On the Chinese side, exposition is not proof--and the elaboration of a counter ideology grounded in civilizationally distinct modalities of rationalization does not in itself eviscerate that against which it is deployed. To know oneself is the step step. But it is no the last, and territories can be surrounded in a number of different and some more elegant ways.
The essay is reproduced below in its original Chinese and in a crude English translation. Readers from liberal democratic states will especially profit from considering the essay, not necessarily for the truth of what it argues, bit for the premises around which it is possible to construct these arguments in ways that not only remain true to the ordering principles of the world view in which it is embedded, but for how that world view substantially affects the way that its holders see themselves, see others, and thus see in Manichean terms the meeting of those two quite distinct visions on the territory and with the people of Taiwan. My own consideration of the essay follows in the next post.
